THE ALBUM COVER ALBUM
Edited by Storm Thorgerson and Roger Dean
Ilex
www.ilex-press.com
The album cover at its greatest contains a spiritual link to the music held within, conjuring up a whole imagined world in the listener’s head. This book is a reprint of the original 1977 tome edited by Storm Thorgerson and Roger Dean and returns in glorious hardback, jam-packed full of colour silvery quality printed images. Plans are also under way for the reprinting of the further five volumes.
The pleasure of the book is as you would expect: the gorgeous technicolour reproductions all together in one handy volume. For those in love with design its a chance to gaze at those great ’70s prog sleeves without having to worry about the musical content contained within (Relayer by Yes… I’m looking at you here).
Those put off by the proliferation of Yes and Pink Floyd covers will find much to appreciate in the covers of less well known artists such as Birth Control, UFO and Jade Warrior. It’s good to see an eclectic choice of albums obviously chosen before the music press insisted on codifying what they considered the classic rock canon to the exclusion of the really interesting stuff.
The book is split into sections on jazz, psychedelia, ‘Golden Years’, ‘Influences And Coincidence’, ‘Miscellany’, ‘Portfolios’ and ‘Devices and Disguises’. The last of these contains pictures of a great triangular German ’70s record sleeve that no collector could leave on the shelf. ‘Influences And Coincidences,’ on the other hand, brings together several albums of similar design ideas. If you’ve ever wanted to see another eight albums in the same vein as the legendary Toe Fat sleeve then this is your chance.
There are many interesting little subsections within the chapters; records linked by a common theme, censored records, those with sleeves designed by the recording artist. I would have appreciated a little more narrative than the brief chapter forewords, but the focus is very squarely on the visual feast.
A great coffee table book for the more discerning coffee table in your life.
Austin Matthews
DUSTY!: QUEEN OF THE POSTMODS
Annie J. Randall
Oxford University Press
www.oup.co.uk
Finally, an un-sensationalist look into the life and music of Dusty Springfield.
Which was the real Dusty? The “White Queen Of Soul”; the Britpop diva; the over-the-top camp performer with the beehive hairdo, overdone mascara and melodramatic hand gestures; the studio perfectionist who didn’t like to work alongside musicians while recording and who took outrageous numbers of tries before being satisfied with a recording of her vocals on a track; the lesbian who never outright denied her sexual persuasion but who was cautious about admitting it?
All of these sides of Dusty are examined in Randall’s thoughtful book. Also looked at are aspects of the singer’s life some may not have heard about before, such as the time she took a defiant stance against the government of South Africa when they wanted her to sign a statement saying she would not perform to mixed race audiences while touring in their country. And we get a glimpse of the mentally unbalanced side of Dusty – she was bipolar and possibly suffered from a kind of multiple personality disorder, “Dusty” maybe being a character that exploded out of the more staid psyche of Mary O’Brien, a middle class English lass and one-time convent girl.
Randall is a professor of Musicology at an American university, and while most of her book is something that can be read and appreciated by lay people, she slips into dull academic speak in the section where she deconstructs the “establishing shots” in the openings of some of Dusty’s “pop arias”. It’s hard to imagine who will gain any insight or appreciation of Dusty’s music by knowing how many seconds into a certain song we are given a clue about its ultimate emotional intent.
However, that same chapter contains the most entertaining part of the book, where Randall makes a connection between the varied and always dramatic hand gestures Dusty used while singing with the similar motions employed by 19th century opera singers and actors. The photo figures which compare some of Dusty’s moves with those of actress Sarah Berhnardt’s are both hilarious and convincing.
It would be great to read a book on Dusty’s music by someone with less of a scholarly leaning. But as a serious exploration of the complicated character of one of the great pop and soul singers to have ever held a mic, this is quite effective.
Brian Greene
I WANT TO TAKE YOU HIGHER: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE
Jeff Kaliss
Backbeat
www.backbeatbooks.com
Marketed as including “the first face-to-face interview with the reclusive superstar in over 20 years”, Kaliss’ biography is a thoroughly researched account of the rise and fall of one of rock’s most enigmatic chameleons. In addition to personal interviews with all of the Family Stone members, Kaliss does eventually speak (twice) with Sylvester ‘Sly’ Stewart, but the substance of those short conversations is limited to a few paragraphs in the last chapter and the Afterword. Before that, Kaliss takes the reader on a magical journey from Stewart’s early years as house producer for fellow DJ, Tom Donahue’s Autumn Records (home of his earliest solo recordings and production duties for acts like The Beau Brummels, Great Society and Charlatans) through the band’s triumphant Woodstock performance and subsequent rise to the top of the charts.
But Kaliss doesn’t soft pedal Stewart’s downslide into the cesspool of guns, attack dogs, nefarious hangers-on and drugs that eventually alienated him from his fellow band members. Convinced no one could fully translate the sounds in his head onto vinyl, Sly diminished the roles of fellow Family members, often resorting to electronic substitutes, multiple overdubs, tape loops, and providing his own bass and guitar parts. Nevertheless, his early rhythmic experiments influenced everyone from Stevie Wonder, Prince, and Miles Davis (an occasional visitor to Sly’s drug den in LA) to the jazz fusion of Weather Report, Chick Corea’s Return To Forever and Herbie Hancock to later pop-soul acts like Earth, Wind & Fire, The Commodores, Kool & The Gang, and Parliament/Funkadelic, whose fellow space cadet, George Clinton labelled Sly “my idol” and inducted The Family Stone into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 (and who also provides the book’s Preface). Kaliss also suggests that Sly’s insistence that his band were “perceived more as entertainers and musicians than as a psychedelic freak show” may have convinced Jimi Hendrix to tone down his guitar pyrotechnics in favour of “the more soulful palette displayed on Electric Ladyland and Band Of Gypsies”.
If there’s any hesitation in fully recommending the book, it’s Kaliss’ over-reliance on third-hand quotes. Much of the conversations with Family members Jerry Martini, Cynthia Robinson and Sly’s sister (Rose) and brother (Freddie, himself now an ordained minister) are overshadowed by extensive excerpts from Joel Selvin’s 1998 Sly & The Family Stone: An Oral History and the Showtime documentary, The Skin I’m In. Readers and fans looking for behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the recording sessions will, for the most part be disappointed, although his tales of the drug-induced debauchery surrounding the recording of There’s A Riot Going On accurately reflect his subject’s spiral out of the public’s eye into failed rehab attempts and a multitude of legal hassles. Future publicity stunts like his marriage to Kathy Silva at New York’s Madison Square Garden, the band’s numerous failed attempts at comebacks (in various permutations, all ruined by Sly’s failure to participate), and his subsequent semi-revival at the 2006 Grammy ceremonies are all covered, but I would have liked more detailed information. Kaliss’ extensive bibliography shows he did a lot of research for the book, but it occasionally reads like a graduate thesis with too much third-party commentary and not enough from his subject. Still, he does capture the essence of the decadent musical scene that provided the world with one of the first multi-racial acts to blend pop, funk and soul into a powerful and influential force that still reverberates in the hip hop and soul acts of today. Not a bad ride for a band that was turned down by Bill Graham (not interested in a dance band) and whose record company originally wanted them to sound like The 5th Dimension!
Jeff Penczak
IMMEDIATE: LABELS UNLIMITED
Simon Spence
Black Dog Publishing
www.blackdogonline.com
In the mid-60s Andrew Loog Oldham was the King Of Hip. He was the manager and producer of The Rolling Stones (he wrote all those out-there liner notes to the early Stones albums). And if that didn’t give him enough hipster cred, he also ran an ultra-cool and initially successful independent record label, Immediate, aided by business partner Tony Calder (who comes across in this book as a tough-talking card sharp type who did the dirty work).
The early days of Immediate were a wild romp and an exhilarating time. Oldham and Calder brought the world the earliest recordings by people like the pre-Velvet Underground Nico, Chris Farlowe, PP Arnold, The Small Faces and The Nice. ALO was still only in his early 20s, and he was making it known that music belonged to the young and that the old and tired label execs and musicians should bugger off and make way for people like himself.
But sometime around 1967 or ’68, not long after Oldham and the Stones parted ways, things began to go wrong for Immediate. While many of their releases were doing well on home turf, they weren’t selling in the US. Oldham and Calder were forced to let many of their biggest acts go. Finally, around the end of the decade, Immediate was forced to fold up its tent.
Simon Spence is a former NME/Face writer who has had quite a history working alongside Andrew Loog Oldham. Initially hoping to write ALO’s biography, Spence eventually did much of the legwork on Oldham’s autobiography, Stoned and 2Stoned. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this book is the last chapter, where Spence relates some of his experiences working with ALO in this process – the two of them together in Oldham’s sanctuary of Bogota, Colombia, Oldham’s behaviour wildly unpredictable.
Immediate: Labels Unlimited is a great read, and will be a treat to anyone who knows or cares about Oldham, Some of the most engrossing parts of the book are clips of Oldham’s own columns for various UK publications, where he got to let the world know what he and his label artists were up to, what his thoughts were on the issues of the day in the music biz at large. There are also countless photos of Immediate record covers, candid band shots and the like, which are worth the price of the book alone.
Having said all of that, it must be noted that the book is rather sloppily written and edited. It seems pedantic to complain about things like typos and punctuation and usage errors when discussing a book on rock ‘n’ roll; but when these things run rampant, as they do here, it becomes a distraction and makes for a bumpy read. Also, someone writing music from the ’60s should know that the guy who wrote ‘For Your Love’ (mis-titled ‘For My Love’ here) is named Graham Gouldman, and not George!
Brian Greene
IT’S ALL GOOD: A JOHN SINCLAIR READER
John Sinclair
Headpress
www.headpress.com
Whenever the subject of John Sinclair crops up it’d be a safe bet to assume that The MC5, White Panther Party, John Lennon or marijuana are also mentioned in the same breath. Justifiably so maybe, but this is not to detract from Sinclair’s other achievements; and this collection of Sinclair’s writing follows hot on the heels of his contributions to, and editing of the recent Headpress 28 anthology The Gospel According To Unpopular Culture.
It’s All Good covers over 40 years worth of assorted rants, raves, reviews, articles, and essays about everything Sinclair holds dear, or feels passionately about. Equally enthusiastic about jazz and blues practitioners of the past and more recent years, Sinclair is undoubtedly a blues and jazz historian of some calibre. He also acknowledges the debt that nearly all popular music of the late 20th century owes to the early blues men of the Mississippi Delta. Very occasionally the reader can become bogged down in the minutiae; such is Sinclair’s attention to detail. But, this is a minor quibble, and generally his writing is as engaging as it is casual, as earnest as it is humorous, and it makes for enjoyable reading throughout. Other subjects include Dr John, Sun Ra, Jack Kerouac, Irma Thomas and Iggy Pop to name a few, whilst, naturally enough, his associations with the aforementioned MC5, White Panther Party and John Lennon are also covered in some depth.
A free 13-track CD provides the perfect accompaniment to 22 pieces of verse that intersperse the book. At times Sinclair’s voice is pure Beefheart growl, at others it comes across like marijuana infused honey – so deep and mellow you could listen to it for hours. Musical backing is provided predominantly by a floating collective of musicians known as The Blues Scholars. Other guests include renowned jazz alto saxophonist Marion Brown, Detroit blues axe-man Jeff Grand, and another Motor City guitar maestro you may have heard of called Wayne Kramer. ‘Brilliant Corners’, ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness’ and Sinclair’s very own epic story of the blues, ‘Fattening Frogs For Snakes’, being particular standouts here, but, as the title suggests, it’s all good.
Rich Deakin
JOHNNY: THE WORK OF PSYCHEDELIC ARTIST JOHNNY HURFORD
Compiled and edited by Jonathan Hill
Sunset Press
This little gem actually slipped out in 2006 but with such little fanfare that it wasn’t until recently that I found out about it and snaffled one up.
Johnny Hurford is a psychedelic artist whose work graced the covers of OZ, IT and Gandalf’s Garden and posters for Middle Earth in the late ’60s. He’s gone on to illustrate countless other books, magazines, posters, publications and ephemera.
Born and raised in the rural idyll of North Devon (where he still lives and works) he started drawing aged five and was turned on by rock music and trips to London and Liverpool as a teenager in the mid-60s. His art depicted a twisted world of landscapes, trees, flowers and animals born of his home county. This happened to coincide with the similarly naturalistic tendencies of the psychedelic art that began appearing in OZ and on record sleeves and posters in 1967. Taking acid in ’68, becoming a central figure in the local hippie scene and finally showing his work in London at the first ever psychedelic poster exhibition sealed his fate as a psychedelic artist and those formative hallucinogenic qualities have coloured pretty much everything else he’s done since.
This beautiful full-colour hardback is stuffed full of reproductions and sketches from a 40-year career that encompasses those heady years as well as expert portraits and landscapes, children’s books and soft porn and is enlivened by Johnny’s reminiscences of the people, places and cultural touchstones that inspired him.
Andy Morten
MELLOTRON: THE MACHINE AND THE MUSICIANS THAT REVOLUTIONISED ROCK
Nick Awde
Desert Hearts
www.deserthearts.com
“It sounds like purple fog,” Andy Partridge of XTC once told me.
John Hawken of Renaissance and The Strawbs recalls it as being capable on a bad day of making “all sorts of horrible noises, like animals being mistreated.”
Me? I think it sounds like teeth; scarily omnivorous, all-powerful, inscrutably grinning teeth, like those you would find on a horrible Victorian drawing of the Sun’s face. What are we talking about? The Mellotron, of course; the fragile, frustrating, ill-tempered, intractable and altogether wonderful keyboard instrument which is the subject of Nick Awde’s excellent new book.
Appropriately enough when paying tribute to such a hernia-inducing device, Nick’s book is a satisfyingly weighty lodestone, which runs to nearly 600 pages. Casual observers may blanch at the prospect, but before your eyes roll back in your head at the thought of being faced with an enervating, will-sapping technical manual, rest assured that this is nothing of the sort.
All the gen is there if you want it of course; but if anything, Nick’s book ambitiously seeks to place the Mellotron in a cultural, sociological and even psychological context by telling the stories of the people whose lives were inextricably associated with it. The structure is simple and coherent: each chapter is someone’s separate testimony, and the book is topped and tailed with Nick’s passionate, informed, argumentative, super-intelligent and drily humorous essays.
Rick Wakeman and Robert Fripp aside, practically all of the Mellotron’s most celebrated users are represented: Mike Pinder, Ian McDonald, Tony Banks and Woolly Wolstenholme among them. Many seem to have philosophically regarded “the Beast” as a necessary evil, a temperamental means to a transcendental end. Others cordially detested the fucking thing. It was a sod to tune, nigh-on impossible to lift, it didn’t like dampness, dryness, the cold, the heat, being transported or being left in the one place.
A wealth of incidental detail naturally emerges from these pioneers’ tales. Did you know, for example, that Meccano was extensively used in the manufacture of early Mellotrons? Or that audible quirks on the original master tapes include the scraping of a musician’s chair and bursts of applause? The tapes utilised by “the world’s first sampler” were strips of tape, not loops, so the notes ran out after eight seconds – meaning that musicians had to adopt a whole new technique of trimming the keys to keep chords going. That, and learning to compensate for the sluggish delay between the pressing of the keys and the notes actually emerging…
Caveats are few regarding Nick’s book: a dogged proof-read would have cleared up the odd inaccuracy and inconsistency, and irredeemably hardcore Mellotron nutters may feel that there is too much back story in some chapters, but then that’s surely the whole point: the thrill of finding out how this extraordinary device dropped into musicians’ lives like a Tardis, except twice as heavy.
There’s a ‘64 “for sale” advert from The Stage at the back of the book for Geoff Unwin’s Magic Carpet Inn Mellotron which describes it as “ideal for dancing, singing and general fun.” Fun? Great, I’ll bring my gallows and cyanide capsules. Make no mistake, the Mellotron is the gloomiest, most moribund-sounding instrument of all time; and that’s why we love it, of course.
Buy this book.
Marco Rossi
OLD RARE NEW: THE INDEPENDENT RECORD SHOP
Edited by Emma Pettit, Nadine Kathe Monem and Rita Vozone
Black Dog Publishing
www.blackdogonline.com
I worked in and managed record stores longer than I care to admit to, putting in my last shift in one of those shops in the summer of 2001. Over my last few years working in the business, I was constantly asked questions about the state of the music industry, particularly the retail arm. What effect was file-sharing having on music sales? Were amazon.com and eBay killing record shops? Why should anyone buy a major label new release CD at a mom and pop store, when they could get the same disc at Best Buy or Wal-Mart for two or three dollars less? The funny thing was, the people asking these questions were almost always individuals who didn’t care much about music.
These same questions are explored in this quick and highly enjoyable read, via interviews with, and essays by, various musicians, music journalists, DJs, and record shop owners. The primary question underlying all of the bits and pieces seems to be: was/is the record store really necessary, will it be missed if things reach the point where you really can no longer hunt for rare vinyl in a favourite shop? The answer: a resounding YES! We do need record stores, because it’s just more fun to find a great album by digging through bins in a cool shop, because of all the great recommendations you can get from knowledgeable staff, because of the social experience of being in a hallowed place with kindred spirits.
More than a mere homage to record shops, though, Old Rare New is a celebration of the record itself. Bob Stanley’s essay gives a brief history of vinyl as a medium for recording music. Many of the people interviewed rave about certain records, and the packaging of those prized items, in their collection. And there are several pages filled with pictures of classic record covers.
Another graphic motif throughout the book is a collection of photographs of record shops. You see shots of stores’ various inner and outer signage, the posters and other displays within the shops, and, most importantly, photos of their bins filled with records. It only takes a few moments of looking at these pictures to know what you can get from an authentic record store that you can never get from an mp3 or a purchase made via an on-line auction.
Brian Greene
SO YOU WANT TO BE A ROCK ‘N’ ROLL STAR: THE BYRDS DAY-BY-DAY 1965-1973
Christopher Hjort
HOT BURRITOS: THE TRUE STORY OF THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS
John Einarson with Chris Hillman
Both Jawbone Press
www.jawbonepress.com
About two decades ago when The Long Ryders had just broken up (ask your grandparents) and I received in the mail two inches of A4 pages listing every gig The Byrds did and every gig they did as solo acts from the moment Gene Clark left the group to the mid-70s. (There were even some pre-Byrd gigs listed by the young solo folkie David Crosby.) The compiler said he had been through every logical daily newspaper, rock magazine, TV Guide and underground publication before researching word-of-mouth rumour and interviewing several Byrds to double-check facts, a formidable task in the pre-internet days.
Did Christopher Hjort have the same list in Oslo? Already several of my old Sunset Strip heyday veterans are grumbling there are mistakes in Hjort’s impressive tome but how could there not be? I could be ungenerous here and point out a good half dozen small factual errors but in light of Hjort uncovering several dozen gems of information which neither I nor Johnny Rogan nor David Fricke nor the late Greg Shaw ever knew then surely The Byrds fan on your block must admit what a great, worthy addition this is to this great group’s legacy and bow, immediately and three times a day, in the direction of Oslo in deep gratitude to Mr. Hjort.
The Flying Burritos book is another matter. The first chapters blatantly attempt to tilt the Burritos’ legacy in Hillman’s direction and at the expense of Gram Parsons. True, Hillman is a God who never has received his just due and, equally true, Gram was a lazy, self-centred git who Hillman musically carried on his back at times. Nonetheless it is truly tragic how not one voice is raised in Gram’s defense and hardly anyone shows much sympathy to a lonely, sad young man born to one of the most dysfunctional families in rock’s quixotic history.
Once Gram leaves the Burritos the unnecessary one-sidedness of the book is gone and the tenor of the read gets brighter and more informative as the work of the latter day Burritos, when Hillman had molded them into a crack live band, gets credit for being the amazing in concert act they were indeed.
Sid Griffin |
